17 January 2007 1:52 PM

I shall be away from the office for a short while and may not be able to do a full-length post for some time, but will where possible. In the meanwhile, here are some responses to contributions from readers last week.

On schools

J.F. Keane accuses me of missing the point about 'special needs'. I don't accept this. The problem of our state schools is a general one, resulting from egalitarian or anti-authoritarian dogmas being placed above education. 'Special needs' sounds really alarming, as if the child involved is in some way physically or mentally damaged. In a small minority of cases, this may be so. But for the most part children with 'special needs' didn't have those needs until they were subjected to the disastrous teaching methods of so many of our primary schools. All they specially need is to be made to sit in rows and learn things by heart, after having been swiftly taught to read. Fat chance in much of the state system, however, as the woeful figures on literacy and numeracy show.

These schools are very glad to pretend that their serial failure to teach children to read can be blamed on the invented 'disease' of dyslexia or the invented 'disorder' of ADHD and its many allies. Actually it results from their ideological hatred of synthetic phonics, a wholly reliable and successful reading teaching method, whose virtues have been repeatedly proven by research over more than half a century, which many modern teachers apparently regard as being beneath them. In much the same way, they seem to despise chanting times tables or correcting spelling.

A few years ago there was a great wave of 'special needs' statements, as parents and heads realised this meant the deployment of extra resources, often in the form of 'teaching assistants' whose value seems to me to be doubtful. But those resources then became so expensive that it's now getting far harder to obtain such a statement, and if one is issued it's so vague that it doesn't commit the local authority to doing anything, let alone spending any money.

As it happens, the collapse of good primary education, encouraged but not begun by the Plowden report, marched in step with the collapse of good state secondary education, unleashed by Anthony Crosland's circular 10/65 , which blackmailed and bludgeoned most local education authorities into going comprehensive. Once the grammar schools had gone, the primary schools had no objective to work for. The destruction of rigour at secondary level, where core education takes place, quickly affected both primary schools and universities.

*****

'Wayland' compares the 11-plus, absurdly, to slavery and racial segregation. He also seems to have a pretty vague idea of how it operated. This sort of exaggeration deprives language of any meaning, so you have no words left when something really bad does happen. Failure at any stage in life is hard to take, but 11-year-olds can and do recover (John Prescott hasn't done too badly for himself). Surely it's better that people fail at school tests than that their inadequacy is not spotted and they go on to fail at work? And what if a whole nation fails the test of being able to pay its bills and feed itself, a test we seem likely to fail before too long, largely because we no longer know anything, or how to do anything, and - worst of all - don't even know how badly-educated we are. Were it not for our private schools, which have also been dragged down by the general attack on knowledge, we would be even worse off.

In any case, as I have made clear, I don't propose a crude return to the pre-1965 world. I favour the German system, of selection in consultation between parents, teachers and pupils, with those who feel they have been wrongly assessed being allowed two years to prove themselves in grammar schools, and the possibility of late transfers.

I'd add that being compelled, by inexorable fate, to attend a bog-standard comprehensive because you live in its catchment area is much crueller than being compelled to go to a secondary modern because you failed a reasonably fair exam. The secondary moderns were not that good (more on this later) but they were in many cases better than modern comprehensives.

*****

As for Patrick Hadley's figures on poor children in today's remaining 165 grammar schools in England, these don't really tell you anything important. Why not? Because these grammar schools are exceptional survivors, surrounded on all sides by a national comprehensive system. Most of them are concentrated in Kent and Buckinghamshire, London commuter counties chosen by canny middle-class people who are prepared to pay, in train fares and house prices, for the education of their young.

What's more, the prospect of getting a fee-free secondary education (which would cost around £50,000 per child in post-tax income) persuades many middle-class parents to spend heavily on private tuition or on preparatory schools so that they can get their brood into grammar schools. Of course this distorts the situation, and keeps poor children out.

If you were to do a parallel survey in Northern Ireland, which still has a fully selective system in all counties, I think you would find the proportion of children from poor homes much higher. It's certainly the case that Northern Ireland's state school system does much better than mainland state schools at getting children from poor homes into university.

I know of no research from the past on this, but if you can get hold of Dod's Parliamentary Companion for 2004 (before a lot of grammar school products retired or died) it is amazing to see how many Labour MPs from working-class backgrounds went to grammar schools in England and Wales, or to their equivalents, Academies, in Scotland.

There's no doubt that selective schools help the middle class. Since the middle class is based on merit rather than heredity that is as it should be. But they also benefit the bright children of working class homes. Should the fact that they benefit the middle class, and that this excites the rage of spiteful levellers, be used as a reason to shut them down, so denying them to the working class too? How daft can you get?

As for middle class children escaping Secondary Moderns through private education, no doubt they did. They also escape bad comprehensives through private education, and through their parents paying large house prices to move into good catchment areas. This is bound to happen in a free country. The interesting thing is that the bog-standard private secondary schools were in trouble in the early 1960s, because they were being outclassed by the grammars. Nowadays they're all thriving. And the desperately low standard of the GCSE and A level exams designed for comprehensive schools means that even a poor or average private school can soar to the top of the leagues. Interestingly, several of the really good private schools, which use the tougher IGCSE exams and the International Baccalaureate, come out rather badly in the tables. The other interesting thing is that grammar schools allowed children who weren't from well-off homes to escape from secondary moderns, because of academic ability. Yet it is now an article of faith in the Labour Party that the only thing that CANNOT qualify you for a good secondary education is academic ability.

*****

Somebody called 'Notimpressed' says I seem to have a "very rosy" view of Secondary Moderns. Perhaps 'Notimpressed' could re-read my posting and produce quotations to back up this claim. I have actually done some research on Secondary Moderns, and found that, towards the mid-1960s, several of them were getting pupils through A levels at reputable grades. I would also maintain that most of them were no worse than (and I suspect many would have been actively better than) modern comprehensives, since discipline hadn't collapsed so completely in those days, and 11-year-olds could usually read well enough to benefit from their lessons. But I have never pretended that the Secondary Moderns were a success. Nor are comprehensives, from which the only escape is through money. And I fail to see how Secondary Modern pupils were helped by smashing up the grammar schools.

*****

'Sue M' describes the rescue of a 'dyslexic' child by a specially-trained teacher. Well, I just wonder what that teacher was 'specially-trained' to do. Synthetic phonics, as not used in most British primaries, I should think.

*****

'Rightwingprof' protests that this is all a bit baffling for North American readers. Well, our comprehensive system is modelled directly on your High School system. It was devised by a civil servant called Graham Savage in 1928, after a visit to New York State and Indiana. Interestingly, Savage acknowledged that the US system would result in lower standards and the holding back of brighter children (which later defenders of his idea would always deny). But he thought it was more 'democratic' i.e. egalitarian.

Savage invented the expression 'Comprehensive School' and was put in charge of introducing the first such schools in England by the then London County Council after World War Two. He later came to regret the destructive effect his idea had on many fine grammar schools.

The US system was always designed for social engineering purposes, to make Americans out of immigrants and (in some states) to stop the spread of the Roman Catholic parochial schools, which WASP politicians saw as a major political and cultural threat.

As a result, its education level was lower than the old selective British system (hence the large 'brain drain' of scientists from Britain to the US in the 1950s).

And the sort of broad, liberal education which used to be conferred by the British 'A' level exams (now hopelessly devalued) was generally achieved in the US at college level. The US middle class don't save for school fees, but for college fees. If the federal government did to US colleges what our national government has done to our secondary schools (and then US politicians bought or fiddled their own children into Ivy League universities closed to most), then it would be a similarly pungent issue on your side of the ocean.

Private secondary education in the US is the preserve of the very rich indeed, and so not a major political issue. Labour would like the same thing to happen here, so that it was simply out of the reach of the middle class. Things are rapidly going that way, as it happens. And University, which was once virtually free to those who got there, is becoming increasingly costly.

*****

Peter North says I neglect the crimes of the Tories in this field. I don't think that's true. Any of my regular readers knows of the boundless contempt I have for the Tories, especially over education and their failure to defend the grammar schools. I am not sure it was based on the sophisticated thinking that Mr North sets out, and suspect it was just electoral cowardice and a mistaken belief that comprehensives were popular, plus a total failure to grasp Labour's ideological motive. Whatever the truth, the comprehensives have been factories of Labour and Lib Dem voters, and have done much to destroy the Conservative party and the striving, patriotic middle class from which it sprang. Their punishment for their failure has been pretty brutal. It's one of the main reasons they can never win another election. I didn't dwell on it much in this posting because Ruth Kelly was the issue.

Still hanging

A very simple point - on executing the wrong person - still seems not to have got across. I'm not saying innocent deaths are all right, or even trying to justify them. I'm just saying that human organisation is imperfect and that shouldn't be a reason against having any organisation at all. Such deaths happen in this and many other areas of public policy, and are not generally judged to be a reason for abandoning any other policies widely thought to be beneficial. In fact, if we took this view, much government would be paralysed.

Nobody wants innocents to die. Every possible effort should be made to avoid it, though in the knowledge that perfection is unattainable. It is terrible to kill an innocent. However, those who advance this risk as an absolute reason for not using the death penalty are dishonest with themselves, and inconsistent in their own minds. For in many other fields of life, they support - for utilitarian reasons - other policies, which are certain to result in the killing of innocent people. Now, if you believe that the danger of an unintended innocent death, however small, is itself a reason for rejecting the death penalty, then you must -in logic - take the same view about the other policies that carry a similar (or larger) risk. And if you don't take that view on any other policy, you cannot take it on the death penalty.

A lot of people who pretend to oppose the death penalty for fear of killing innocents do not reject other policies on the same grounds. Take the two conventional parties. They supported the Iraq, Kosovo and Afghan wars, in which innocent deaths were a certainty. They accept the arming of the police, whose results we know. They accept the 'care in the community' policy under which seriously mentally ill people are allowed to roam the country without proper supervision and all too often to kill or maim. They support the early release of convicted murders, which makes innocent deaths a certainty. They support a transport policy based upon motor cars and readily available driving licences, which causes thousands of innocent deaths a year. And so on. Ultimately, all those of us who accept that just wars are possible, and view World War Two as one such - must accept that our present liberties were bought by warfare which undoubtedly led to unintended innocent deaths and was bound to do so. And we would do it again if the same circumstances arose. All these deaths, like those of wrongly-convicted murderers, are unintended by the framers of these policies, and regretted by them. Efforts are made to reduce them. But the certainty of such deaths, far harder in fact to avoid in these circumstances than a wrongful conviction, exists.

The argument is therefore merely an excuse, a barrier behind which the person who has no real argument can shelter his refusal to reason, which is emotional and irrational. Which brings me once again to Mr Valentine Hayes, formerly of Toronto and now of Dublin.

In response to what I regard as a complete demolition of his arguments about premeditation, he offers no serious response. He even tells me I have been using the word 'premeditated' literally, as if this were a bad thing. Well, how else can one use such a word? Does it have a figurative or metaphorical meaning? Actually, I was using it clearly and precisely, and correctly, which is what he didn't like.

Of course the maintenance of a power to execute heinous murderers is not 'exactly akin' to maintaining armed forces with the capacity to kill anyone who attacks you. I didn't say it was. Exact kinship is not necessary to establish essential similarity. However, it is similar enough to show that 'premeditation' cannot be used as a way to differentiate between the maintenance and occasional use of a death penalty and the killing of enemies in war by trained armed forces. It could be said that had our preparations for war been better premeditated in 1939 or earlier - and we had possessed a proper, well-equipped army trained in co-operation with air power by 1936 - then there might have been no war at all. But, as with the death penalty used against individual murderers, deterrence by the maintenance of serious armed force, whose existence is known to potential enemies, is more effective the more convincing it is and the more you can show that you mean what you say. In the case of air power, the ability (rehearsed and premeditated) to retaliate in kind is and always has been the most effective defence against attacks on cities from the air. Would we have bombed Baghdad or Belgrade if they could have bombed us back?

He may fool some by misrepresenting the shooting down of a bomber by a fighter (whose pilot has been trained for this act over many years, and whose aircraft has been designed and manufactured over a similar period at vast expense, the fruit of parliamentary debates and votes, Cabinet committees and dozens of meetings and memos flying across Whitehall) or AA battery as an act similar to an act of self defence by a man attacked in the street, to someone who isn't thinking very hard. But he cannot make this confusion over a retaliatory air-raid on Berlin.

The deaths of every German soldier and airman in World War two were the result of premeditated lethal preparation by Germany's enemies. If only there had been more of it. If Mr Hayes wishes to distinguish between defensive or retaliatory war, he will have to find another way to do it. In fact, the two are morally identical. The comparison with on-the-spot self defence against an unprovoked attack does not stand. War did not come out of the blue in 1939 or 1914, but had in both cases been prepared for, for years, and resulted in both cases from a failure by the defender powers to make adequate and convincing defensive, deterrent precautions. Men do not train for years and equip themselves with elaborate weapons to defend themselves against street attacks. On the contrary, in civilised countries they rely on the weapons and penalties of the law and the police to do that for them (just as they rely on the government to defend their borders, airspace and territorial seas against the danger of aggression). In some countries the law comes armed with a gun. In others it comes armed with capital justice.

Having failed here, he then (like most abolitionists) switches to the easy emotionalism of the abolitionist camp, with which he feels comfortable, for he assumes (I hope wrongly) that many in this audience will lose the thread of the argument as a result, and fail to notice that he's losing on facts and logic. He says, " I trust it is clear to all readers that you, like most of the rest of the hanging lobby, have simply dodged the difficult issue as to whether you would be personally willing to execute another man."

It's not a difficult issue at all, nor have I dodged it. I have no intention of applying for the post of hangman. If I said the opposite, do you know what? Mr Hayes wouldn't then draw back in admiration to concede that I was consistent. He would not nobly admit defeat because of the rigour of my logic. Not a bit of it. He would immediately accuse me of being some sort of ghoul. This is a demagogue's trick, for the diversion of simpletons, not an honest argument. I am, however, happy to pay someone else to push that lever.

How the Morgenthau Plan got into this argument, I have no idea. It'll be flying saucers next. As for imprisoning someone without hope of release for the rest of his life, I regard it as an intolerable insupportable cruelty and think that only someone who has no idea what prisons are like, or is immensely callous, could favour it. I'm not in general in favour of long prison sentences, just punitive ones. Mr Hayes should try spending two nights locked in a cell, and see what he thinks of lifelong incarceration after that. Swift and competent execution is, by comparison, humane. I do not favour the torture, public humiliation or long-drawn-out terrorising of convicted murderers. I just wish to see justice done on them, and retribution served with deterrent force. Again, I do urge Mr Hayes to read the relevant chapter in my book 'A Brief History of Crime', available from any good library since it is no longer in print, having proved too controversial.

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09 January 2007 4:28 PM

Once again the Labour government are impaled on their own stupid education policy, and once again the Useless Tories are coming to their rescue. Poor old Ruth Kelly has quite rightly put her child first and ignored the silly 'principles' that, as a Labour Education Secretary, she supported and must still publicly support.

Quite rightly, the Tories have praised her for looking after her child. But they haven't made any hay out of the fact that this makes nonsense of Labour's mad comprehensive obsession. David Cameron has cleared Miss Kelly of hypocrisy. Can this be right? The point is that the hypocrisy lies not in sending her child to a private school, but in doing so while clinging to the wretched policies which prevent the state education system from being able to educate her child properly. But the Tories cannot say this because they, too, are now equally committed to non-selective, rigour-free state schools, from which the only escape is through wealth, influence, luck or power.

The Labour elite's vast, despicable hypocrisy about schooling is their weakest point, the place at which their dishonesty and selfishness is most perfectly exposed.

Famously, Anthony Blair said in May 1997 "what I want for my own children I want for yours". But what he turned out to want was places at the London Oratory, a near-unique school which - as I pointed out at the time - was comprehensive in the same way that 10 Downing Street is an inner-city terraced house. It was also not available to most of the rest of us.

His was only one of several methods used by Labour politicians to pretend to support comprehensive education while avoiding it in person. Here are some other methods used by these people: Buy a house in the catchment area of a good school; get your child into a grammar school; hire private tutors while continuing to send your child to a state school you know isn't good enough.

Because Mrs Blair is a Roman Catholic, the Premier's children qualified for the Oratory, a very special and exceptional school. Mr Blair was able to avoid the bog-standard comprehensives of North London, where he then dwelt, without having to commit the terrible sin of paying fees, which in those days would have destroyed his political career.

Why exactly is this is a sin, except in that he preaches to others what he doesn't practise himself? Why should it be morally better to send your children to a bad expensive school, kept going by tax money however bad it is, than to a good expensive school, kept going by private fees? Is it a matter of privilege? Well, not exactly. The parent who pays fees does not stop paying taxes. He still funds the costly state schools, whether good or bad, that he doesn't use. And by paying fees, out of taxed income, he helps create the school place he does use, with money that he might just as easily have spent on wine, or air fares. He doesn't deprive anybody of anything. If all the private schools were shut down, their excellence would simply disappear. It wouldn't, by being mixed into the state comprehensive system, miraculously raise its general standards. Private schools are good because they are not comprehensives.

True, if he didn't have the money, he couldn't pay at all. And this is deeply unfair, but only for a reason I'll come to in a moment. But nobody (at least nobody outside the ranks of the Communist movement) claims that it's wrong on principle that some people can spend more money on cars, or holidays or clothes than anyone else, especially if they have earned their money. It certainly doesn't disqualify anyone from being a Labour politician to do such things. Quite a lot of Labour MPs and peers are comfortably off, and many Labour supporters are very rich indeed. Yet, if you happen to have the money to spare, it is far more laudable, surely, to spend money on schooling the next generation in knowledge, manners and culture, than on a couple of weeks on a beach or on a cupboard full of fashionable high-heeled shoes. Better still if some of your fees go (as they often do) on bursaries to provide private education for children whose parents cannot afford it.

By comparison, what's so good about a rich and influential person using his knowledge and skills to wangle a place in a school miles from his home, which might otherwise go to a bright child from a poor home? Surely, that's a real abuse of the privileges of the middle class, since we all know there is a strictly limited number of good state school places, and the poor have hardly any chance of going private.

That is why it is so unfair that only the well-off can pay fees. In the 1960s the mid-range private schools were dying, losing pupils to the grammar schools. Now, even a bad private school can look good in the league tables because far too few state schools are any good, and many of those that are good are harder to get into than the most exclusive club you care to name. It wasn't always like this. Just 40 years ago, in this country, there were thousands of high-quality schools which didn't charge fees. Most of them were Grammar Schools (in Scotland, Academies). There were also Direct Grant schools, private schools which took a large block of pupils from the local state primary system. The parents of the children involved didn't pay fees at all.

As a result, many children from less well-off homes got a first-rate education. Alan Bennett's an example. His father was a Co-op Butcher, but he got to Oxford, with no special measures to help him. Many, many Labour MPs benefited in the same way. In fact, in the mid-1960s the grammar schools were taking over Oxford and Cambridge, even though they weren't specially-equipped (as the good private schools were) to deal with the classical subjects needed in the entrance exams that Oxbridge then held.

Nobody is saying that the system of 40 years ago was perfect. The 11-plus exam was too arbitrary. Germany has a selective system without any such exam. There were too few grammar schools. Many more could have been built at a fraction of the cost of going comprehensive. There were too few grammar places for girls. More should have been created. The Secondary Moderns, to which 11-plus failures went, were often not as bad as is now claimed - and in many cases better than the comprehensives of today - but badly needed improving. There were supposed to be technical schools, but they often hadn't been built. They should have been. But whatever was wrong, it was absurd to destroy the one part of the system that actually worked, like amputating a healthy leg and leaving the diseased one in place.

If we could reverse this foolishness, then Ruth Kelly, and many, many more without her advantages and income, could be sure that their children would be properly educated without needing to pay £15,000 a year for what ought not to be a privilege.

But Miss Kelly, as Education Secretary and as a politician, has set her face against this fair remedy. She is quite entitled to do all in her power for her young. I praise her for it. But how can she then continue to support the system which has failed her own child, and the children of thousands of others?

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In my family, the Royal Navy is much revered. We try, each Boxing Day, to remember the Battle of the North Cape on December 26th 1943, in which my father took part aboard the cruiser HMS Jamaica. It was the last big-ship engagement in European waters, and ended in the sinking of the German pocket battleship Scharnhorst, a rare clear triumph in the grim, frozen, bloody and forgotten struggle to convoy munitions to the Soviet Union past the German-occupied coast of Norway. Our scrapbooks are full of lovely old photographs of warships, elaborate certificates marking crossing-the-line ceremonies at the Equator or the Arctic Circle, and decoded telegrams instructing "British men of war" to "commence hostilities at once with Germany, repeat Germany" and, a few months later.."with Italy, repeat Italy".

I grew up with the Navy just round the corner, when it wasn't actually in the house. In the first house I remember, you could see the cranes of Rosyth from our back garden. I seem to have spent large chunks of school holidays clambering over warships at Navy Days at Devonport or Portsmouth, and these were proper monsters, full-sized aircraft carriers and cruisers. The strong rough stink of fuel oil still has the power to conjure up mental pictures of these great steel castles.

I can still remember the sultry, overcast August afternoon in 1960 when I stood on the shoreline watching the last British battleship, HMS Vanguard, towed to the breakers, and running aground in the Portsmouth mud. How often I had climbed up to her bridge, and admired her enormous 15-inch guns. Now they had been stripped away, and the pride of the fleet was a disembowelled hulk. It looked like a defeat, something to be ashamed of. My childish mind couldn't understand how they could get rid of her. I still think it was a mistake.

That's one of the reasons I wince when I see the word 'battleship' used these days to describe any old warship. Don't these people know that a battleship was a great majestic thing, towering into the sky and deliberately designed to make anyone who saw it gasp with amazement? Winston Churchill memorably described the sight of Dreadnoughts steaming down the Firth of Forth in 1914 as 'like giants bent in anxious thought'. One of these would still come in handy, as the Americans have proved by keeping a couple of their own.

Well, no, people these days don't know this sort of thing, or much else about what used to be in the blood of the British. For them, the men, women and stories described in films such as 'the Cruel Sea', 'Sink the Bismark!' and 'In Which we Serve' are impossibly remote. They never struggled to make an Airfix model of HMS Cossack (Captain Philip Vian RN), the destroyer which all naval children knew had rescued a shipload of captured British seamen from a German prison ship, to delighted shouts of 'The Navy's here!', when everything else was going wrong in our war against Hitler.

They've never even heard the story of Trevor Napier, another destroyer captain, who refused to leave his bridge for long hours of duty in the early months of World War Two, and died (touchingly mourned in verse by his widow, the poet Priscilla Napier) of sheer exhaustion in the defence of national independence and liberty or, as he put it, 'so that his children could grow up English'.

They never toured HMS Victory in the days when the bluejacket guides thrilled visitors with stories of heroism and sacrifice at Trafalgar rather than (as they do now) moaning tediously about the weevils in the biscuits and the poor health and safety arrangements of Nelson's Navy.

Well, it's their loss, and I feel sorry for them that they never saw or heard or felt these things as I have been lucky enough to do. But it could be their loss in future, too. I understand that a country that gives up an empire doesn't need the sort of Navy we still had in my childhood. But an island which lives on its wits by trading with the entire world still has to pay attention to the sea. And it also needs, from time to time, to be able to project its power into foreign parts - for which there is no tool more perfect than an aircraft carrier with a powerful escort, and not just for the look of the thing. The French, who are not even an island but who have long been bred to the sea, realise this and maintain a serious fleet, like the serious people they are.

Just as important, we have in the Navy a collection of experience and tradition which, once got rid of, could not easily be assembled again. It certainly couldn't be rebuilt quickly in a crisis. Wars, as all historians will tell you, often arise out of nowhere, very quickly. I was in Portsmouth the other day and it was a melancholy sight, with few warships to be seen and many of them laid up and mothballed. It seems unimaginable that this great naval station could be closed, but I gather there is a real danger of this. A lot of unimaginable things happen in modernised Britain.

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It's quite possibly true that much organic food is often no better for you than the other stuff - though in the case of meat I suspect that the animals are better looked after, less crammed with growth hormones and antibiotics, and slaughtered in more humane ways, which must make it healthier for us to eat.

The main reason for spending money on organic food seems to me to be that it encourages more civilised methods of farming, which are better for the countryside and for the people living in it. If the food tastes better, and is better for you, then that's a happy bonus. The same applies to the growing number of excellent farmers' markets that have sprung up all over the place, and are becoming a serious alternative to the supermarkets, now that individual butchers and grocers have almost entirely vanished.

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The reason for writing about the death penalty is that it is both important and interesting, and raises many instructive questions about the nature of justice and of morality. I have also found that most people, on both sides of the argument, adopt fixed positions which are immune from facts and logic. I live in hope that sooner or later they will begin to pay attention. It matters. I am critical of unthinking zealots on both sides of this quarrel, and despise crude calls for vengeance just as much as any Guardian-reading liberal does. By the way, a note to one correspondent: I have never advocated flogging, mainly because of the nasty effect I believe it would have on those who have to do the flogging, and groan with boredom at the silly cliche 'hang'em and flog'em'. Why will people refuse to argue in a civilised and honest way? Who do they hope to fool by misrepresenting opponents?

At some point in my long journey away from the political, moral and cultural Left, I found that I could not easily answer the argument for a death penalty. I had, for many years, opposed execution as a matter of course, and had believed this was the natural position of any civilised person. So this realisation, like many of the experiences I had while changing my mind, was none too welcome. I had a choice. Should I suppress my doubts and continue to assert an opinion I did not really believe? Or should I think about it, and be willing to change my opinion if I concluded that I had been wrong? This is why I try to treat the arguments of abolitionists with care, sympathy and respect. I used to be one of them. I don't tend to get the same consideration in return, presumably because they are scared of their own doubts, and express their fear by getting angry with anyone who stimulates those doubts.

I spent much time researching the history, nature and measurable effects of the death penalty. I grasped the important fact that the death penalty in the USA is largely retained for political show, and does not exist as a regular or even frequent (let alone timely) punishment for heinous murder in any of the 50 states. Even so, there does seem to be some relation between the existence of the penalty and the murder rate in some states.

I witnessed two executions in different US jurisdictions. I have now, in a less direct but still unsettling way, witnessed a third. At the end, I still found the act of execution ugly, distressing and squalid. Who could not? But was this an argument against execution, any more than the horror of war (which I have also glimpsed) is an argument against defending oneself against aggression? I think not.

I concluded that there was an unanswerable argument for bringing execution back under strict conditions - that is to say, after trial in a properly constituted court with the presumption of innocence, an independent jury, a free press, the possibility of appeal and of reprieve (Saddam Hussein had none of these).

I thought hard about the claim that the danger of an innocent person being executed is a complete argument against the death penalty. I think it's false and evasive. Those who advance this argument do not accept such a stringent condition on many other policies of which they approve, and which can be absolutely guaranteed to cause the deaths of innocents. For example, the release of convicted murderers from prison can be reliably statistically predicted to lead to the deaths of innocents. It has this effect in Britain at the rate of roughly two homicides every three years. But it is not ruled out for that reason.

Similarly, those liberals who opened the way for the Iraq war by supporting the idealistic bombing of Serbia knew perfectly well that their policy would bring about the deaths of innocents. It did so. Non-monstrous non- war-criminals such as the make-up lady at Belgrade TV were blown to bits by kindly, liberal, idealistic bombs, and I hope these people appreciated the difference at the time between such bombs and the ordinary, cruel conservative type. Yet liberal backers of the War on Slobodan did not then withhold their support from this action on the grounds that it had caused the predictable killing of innocents. They have not since said that they wished they had not endorsed this action. The bombing of Serbia, unlike that of Iraq, remains respectable among many on the liberal left.

The details of my case for execution can be found in the chapter entitled 'Cruel and Unusual' in my book 'A Brief History of Crime' (Atlantic Books, 2003). Far from provoking rational response from the audience I was aiming at, the chapter led to at least one reviewer, who I had previously regarded with respect as an honourable opponent, launching an extravagant personal attack on me. Even so, I urge this chapter on anyone who is genuinely interested in this subject, though not on the sort of person who makes up his mind beforehand. They are not grown up enough for this sort of thing, and should stick to reading books by people they agree with, for fear of being upset by the existence of differing opinions.

My point about police shootings, and about the killings of Uday, Qusay and Mustafa Hussein (Mustafa being an innocent 14-year-old caught up in the crossfire) is directed at those who advance the 'innocent death' and 'obscene ritual ' arguments. Just because you abolish the formal death penalty, you don't end state killing. Which do you prefer - the shoot-out in the street, or due process? You cannot actually say you are against both, in Britain at least. It's a direct choice between one or the other. Pre-1960s Britain didn't have armed police or shoot-outs in the streets. Now it does. The first armed police squad was set up within months of the abolition of the death penalty, following the gun murder of three police officers outside Wormwood Scrubs prison. Coincidence? No. Direct consequence.

And isn't the ritual a necessary by-product of that due process? At the end of a formal, careful trial you can't just drag the condemned man off to the gallows. The fact that Saddam Hussein's death came to resemble a lynching at the end has a lot to do with the flawed nature of his 'trial'. Why was it flawed? Because it was founded not on lawfulness but on a violent usurpation of power by foreign invaders whose motives and methods were in doubt, and whose past connections with Saddam were dubious.

How is the destruction of three lives by anti-tank shells, and the public display of two of their blasted corpses, less obscene than the events in Baghdad execution shed?

A small point here about deterrence. Nobody seriously imagines that all murder can be deterred. Some people will always think they can get away with it, or just not believe they will be punished. What is suggested is that certain types of murder can be deterred, as can crimes of violence which might lead to murder. Here are three examples of how it might operate. When Britain suspended the death penalty in 1948 and 1957, armed crime rose sharply on each occasion, falling again when the suspensions ended. The number of attempted murders and woundings which endanger life have both risen enormously since hanging was abolished in Britain in 1965. Many of these would have been homicides had medical treatment not improved so much in the same period. And in the USA there is evidence that 'stranger murders' - that is the killing of petrol station and shop staff after robberies, or women after being raped, to prevent them being witnesses, have increased since the death penalty ceased to operate as a general punishment, i.e. effectively since the 1960s. These may be coincidences, though the 1948 and 1957 rises in English armed crime are remarkably similar coincidences. You could only be sure that there was a connection if you were prepared to experimentally restore an effective death penalty for some years.

I accept that an absolute pacifist can consistently oppose the death penalty. If you really believe that there are no circumstances in which killing is justified, then you can honestly say that you are against execution on principle. But be careful here. If you believe this, then you presumably believe that resistance, even against the most evil powers on earth, must be non-violent. You would have to say that the RAF Battle of Britain pilots of the late summer of 1940 were wrong to shoot down their Luftwaffe opponents. Would Mr Valentine Hayes, who maintains he is against all killing, be prepared to live (or more likely die in misery after a lengthy period of brutalised enslavement) in a world which gave such a free pass to violent evil? Or is it all right if other people defend him against it? This, it will be argued, is an extreme example. But all such arguments are tested by extremes, and such an extreme example is available in the recent history of our civilised, progress-infested world. If Mr Hayes really means it, then he really means it. Does he? Or is he, like almost all people, prepared to make an exception when it affects him personally?

I'm also baffled by Mr Hayes's suggestion that the use of the word 'execution' or the term 'death penalty' is 'PC' or 'pretentious'. Whatever does he mean by this? PC universally disapproves of the death penalty, and the phrase seems to me to be the opposite of pretentious, being honest and simple. It is most certainly PC to pretend that murder and execution are the same thing. Murder is secret, lawless premeditated killing, generally for a base motive, malice, vengeance, gain or the silencing of a witness to another crime already committed or contemplated. There is no possibility of mercy. Lawful execution is the reverse. The victim's family and friends are specifically denied personal vengeance. Nobody gains materially. No witness is silenced -on the contrary, he has the chance to testify in open court. Due process is observed, public and press scrutiny take place before the act. There is the chance to appeal, and the possibility of reprieve. You may not like execution - nobody is asking you to - but that does not mean you should be unable to tell the difference between two wholly different acts.

The great 19th Century liberal (they were different in those days) John Stuart Mill was brilliantly dismissive of this false equivalence of opposites, in a pro-hanging speech to Parliament in April 1868. He argued (and the speech may be found on the web in full) "that to deter by suffering from inflicting suffering is not only possible, but the very purpose of penal justice. Does fining a criminal show want of respect for property, or imprisoning him, for personal freedom? Just as unreasonable is it to think that to take the life of a man who has taken that of another is to show want of regard for human life. We show, on the contrary, most emphatically our regard for it, by the adoption of a rule that he who violates that right in another forfeits it for himself, and that while no other crime that he can commit deprives him of his right to live, this shall."

The same distinction needs to be made when we consider the strange way in which many (there are honourable exceptions) modern left-wingers are unmoved by mass abortion, dehumanising the unborn baby as a 'foetus', a Latin word employed (as usual) to hide the truth of what is going on. The difference lies in the nature of the person being killed. All unborn babies are innocent. None gets a trial, or the chance to argue its case before it is killed - killed, by the way, in circumstances much grislier than any execution. You will never be allowed to see an abortion on British TV. Its individual life is not even admitted to exist, as lawyers insist that the only 'right to choose' belongs to the baby's mother. The fierce, homicidal influence often exerted on these "free to choose" mothers by husbands and boyfriends is never even mentioned. There is no chance at all of killing a guilty person by this method.

Now, if they were consistently against the killing of anybody, surely they'd have to be against this ganging up of adults on innocent children? But they're often not. You ask them why. Try as I may to put myself in the position of the pro-abortion anti-hanger, I can't get the argument to work. It can only be done by insisting that a baby is not human until a certain (or rather, uncertain) date, set to suit the abortionist rather than the baby, which is understandably not asked if it considers itself human at this stage, or would have considered itself human at this stage if it had survived a little longer and been allowed a say. If you're against hanging, you must also be against abortion. But you can be for hanging murderers and against abortion. The key is innocence or guilt, and beneath that lies the ideal of lawful justice, which is what we are actually talking about.

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03 January 2007 11:44 AM

Unlike most people, I have seen a real execution, conducted by what I suspect is the most disturbing method of all, the electric chair. Asked at the time how it affected me, I said, without having in any way prepared an answer, and to my own surprise, that I felt older for having witnessed it. I expect quite a lot of you will now have some idea of what I meant by this.

I still think quite often about the occasion, and wonder if I did something unforgivable by being there at all. After all, I was not in any way opposed to the execution, of a rather unpleasant and unrepentant murderer who tortured his victims before killing them. In fact I was all in favour of it happening, being a supporter in general of capital punishment, and I welcomed the opportunity to write about it. So I had, in a way, willed it and was, in a way, responsible for it.

I've also researched the whole issue of execution for a chapter on the subject in my book 'A Brief History of Crime', and I know more or less what is involved in a hanging. I've even studied the old Home Office charts, with their instructions on the correct length of rope for hanging men of different weights, and the once-secret accounts of executions that went wrong.

So on Saturday I didn't share my colleagues' shock at the film of Saddam Hussein being led to the noose. Nor am I specially distressed by accounts of the later, more unsparing version in which you can hear the taunts of his executioners, and in which he drops abruptly through the trapdoor. Though I think this has political implications that I'll come to later.

What many people dislike about executions is the ritual. Why is this? I think they are afraid, above all, that they might enjoy watching, and are angry with their civilised selves for wanting to do so. The ceremonial nature of the event makes them think they are watching a human sacrifice, which in some ways they are.

Human sacrifice is one of the things Christianity is supposed to have abolished. People who think that, if we did away with the Christian religion, we would enter into a world of total reasonableness and nice, middle-class behaviour should bear in mind that what they regard as Christian superstition and mumbo-jumbo were in part designed to bring such practices to an end. If Christianity goes, might those old stone gods, with their appetite for human flesh, rise again? Read the Anglican 1662 Communion service to see how it lays it on thick that the sacrifice of Christ on the cross was full, perfect, sufficient, etc, and you'll see what I mean.

Even so, despite centuries of Christianity, ideas of human sacrifice were still very much alive in Britain less than 200 years ago. When gibbets were still common in England, displaying the rotting, chained corpses of the hanged by the wayside, which was the case until the 1830s , many very ancient pre-Christian superstitions surrounded the gallows. People thought that ills could be cured, or wishes granted, by touching the corpse, obtaining a piece of the rope, or hanging tokens from the gallows-tree.

In three of the superb ghost stories of M.R.James - a man who knew his folklore and who obviously talked to country and seafaring people with some care during his Edwardian country rambles - there are accounts of the mystery and superstition which lingered about the gallows. The three, for those who are interested, are 'The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral', 'A View from a Hill' and 'Rats'. Even after public execution was abolished in 1868, there were still rituals outside the prisons where hangings took place. Until 1902 a black flag was hoisted over the prison after each hanging. Until 1901, the prison bell was tolled for 15 minutes before the condemned man was hanged. Right to the end of hanging in 1965, a notice that execution had been carried out was pinned on the prison gates, and in the case of especially notorious killings, crowds would gather to witness this. Many of the people in those crowds were, I should guess, pretty unpleasant, drunks and wife-beaters and that sort.

For in the ritual killing of a murderer we are in a way trying to kill the potential killer that lurks in many of us. I think one of the stupidest and most over-quoted lines in literature is Oscar Wilde's claim that 'Each man kills the thing he loves' in that over-rated man's over-rated poem 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol'. Does each man really do this? Examples please, anyone? I suspect that what people actually want to kill is the opposite. We loathe seeing in other people the things we most dislike in ourselves.

The trouble with this queasiness about ritualised, systematic, cold-blooded death is that ritualised execution is actually preferable by far to the alternative. For all its horror, hanging is preceded by a jury trial with presumption of innocence, and followed by the possibility of appeal and reprieve. It is also a trial held in public, under the scrutiny of a free press. I am against any execution that doesn't have these safeguards, and by jury trial I mean a jury of responsible grown-ups, and a unanimous verdict, not the travesty of jury trial that now exists in England.

Societies that don't have a death penalty tend instead to have trigger-happy armed police, who are allowed to shoot suspects pretty freely. By the way, this applies particularly to the USA. There, various states pretend to have the death penalty for political reasons, But they don't really because it is seldom or ever actually carried out, and then after such a long delay that the killer has forgotten what he did to deserve his fate.

Even in supposedly execution-happy Texas (a silly caricature of that interesting state, by the way) , you are more likely to die of old age on death row than actually be executed, and the time-lapse between crime and punishment is about 10 years. Yet there is a much bigger scandal. The USA as a whole has hundreds of cases each year of suspects shot dead by police officers, and the event being written off as 'justifiable homicide'.

In such executions, there is no jury trial, no appeal, no possibility of reprieve, no presumption of innocence. Yet we seem far readier to accept this crude and unjust form of capital punishment than we are to accept a 'ritualised' hanging. This isn't just a difference in attitudes towards domestic law-enforcement. It works on the world stage too. Nobody, for instance, really cared all that much when Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay were killed in a gun-battle in July 2003 (and the death of Qusay's 14-year-old son Mustafa in the shooting has never attracted any serious attention or criticism). There's another reason for the lack of outrage about this which I'll turn to later.

The display of the brothers' corpses, first in all their gory horror, and later cleaned up, in some ways even more macabre as a result, to make them more recognisable, simply didn't create anything like the fuss that the Saddam execution pictures have done. Yet it should have done, at least because of the third, unintended, death. If you carry out an execution ( as was the case with Uday and Qusay) with anti-tank guns, then it's pretty likely there'll be some 'collateral damage', isn't it? Imagine the hoo-ha if the executioners had hanged a 14-year-old boy by mistake before getting round to Saddam, just because he happened to be standing nearby at the time. But even in occupation Iraq, that's not very likely.

In the 40-odd years since we abolished the rope, we have with remarkable speed moved from being a country with an unarmed police force to a country - much more like the USA - where more and more cops carry guns and are prepared to use them. There are remarkably few protests about this, and I don't recall Amnesty International having much to say about it.

Quite often, the police marksmen get the right people. Occasionally, as Jean Charles de Menezes found, they don't. Those who argue that the danger of hanging the wrong man is a total and unanswerable objection to the death penalty ought surely to take the same view of police killings, and insist on the disarming of the police. But, funnily enough, they don't take this view. This is because the risk of killing innocents isn't really their reason for objecting to capital punishment. It's a pretext that avoids the real question.

What they're against, on the surface anyway, is the ritual. Why? Partly because the ritual makes it clear that the killing has official and lawful sanction, and they are personally responsible for it as citizens of a democracy. This feeling of being made responsible is all the greater for left-wing politicians, or any politicians, who feel uncomfortable about signing an actual death warrant. People don't like responsibility, especially that kind.

And in many cases they're rather disgusted with themselves for even being interested in the process, as abolitionists usually are (interested, I mean). Look and see how many watched the Saddam videos, expurgated and unexpurgated, and I'll bet there were a fair few Guardian-reading liberals among them. I didn't notice any special squeamishness or delicacy among the left-wing papers in their coverage of the affair, either. The anti-capital-punishment movie 'the Green Mile' (which I much regret having watched during a long flight, not having any real idea of what was coming) is extraordinarily graphic about what happens if an electrocution is botched. The anti-execution movie (there are lots of these) "Dead Man Walking" also features an absurdly caricatured scene of a lethal injection, in which ethereal music is played as the condemned man is hoisted into something rather like a crucifixion position. This is entirely inaccurate. Nothing of the sort happens. Lethal injection executions are remarkable for their total lack of drama. The recent British anti-hanging film 'Pierrepoint' also dwelt rather lengthily on some of the more intimate aspects of the execution of women.

Well, perhaps liberals should be embarrassed about their fascination with the matter. I'm sure Freud and the others would have much to say about the pornography of the execution shed. But these are deep waters, Watson. Let us get back to the political implications of Saddam's execution.

Lord Macaulay, in his sizzling account of the English Civil War, rightly points out that the execution of King Charles the First was not just a crime, but an error on the part of Cromwell. Charles was a duplicitous cheat and a would-be autocrat, who had come close to ruining his country through irresponsibility and greed for power. He had sacrificed his closest allies and friends to save his own skin. He had turned brother against brother and divided a formerly happy country against itself. He was utterly discredited.

Yet, subjected to a kangaroo court, without true legal authority, he became a kind of hero, arguing with total truth and much dignity that the trial was unlawful. And his execution, during which he bore himself with legendary calm and courage, turned him into a martyr, so much so that an immortal poem was written about the event, and a small band of eccentrics still annually marks his death with solemn commemorations. Accounts of the beheading mention the great uncontrollable groan of horror that spread through the crowd when they realised that the thing had actually happened - the Lord's Anointed had been killed before their eyes. By executing Charles, Cromwell ensured that there would one day be a Restoration.

I know, I know, Saddam Hussein was not Charles Stuart. For all his political faults, the judicially-murdered King of England was a true nobleman, a loving husband and father and a kindly, educated and intelligent man of some grace and culture. Saddam was a near-feral street child and gunman, who rose to power in a violent country through ruthlessness and a willingness to kill.

But 21st-century Iraq is also not 17th- century England (which even by then was an incredibly advanced and lucky country, with a long history of limited government and the rule of law). And Saddam, who has been turned into a fabled monster by Western leaders trying to frighten their voters, was in truth not much more than a three-star ogre by the standards of Stalin, Hitler, Mao or Pol Pot. That is why, when he came to the dock in his trial, he was able to show himself to advantage. He couldn't possibly be as bad as they had said he was.

The same thing happened to Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, another cut-rate villain turned into a gigantic monster by people who needed a bogeyman to justify their actions and to make themselves seem more important than they really are. If you go out on a wolf-hunt, with much blowing of trumpets, it is pretty shaming to come home with nothing more than a few rats and a rabbit slung over your saddle-bow. So you have to pretend your rat is a wolf. In which case it is surely wiser not to display your inadequate trophies on TV?

Men just as bad as Saddam, and far worse than Milosevic, have been welcome guests at the White House and Downing Street, or will be. That is the nature of things, always has been, always will be.

The trial itself may have been all right by Iraqi standards, but so what? Our whole war was based on the belief that Iraq needed to become more like us, not the sort of country where the judge had to be replaced mid-trial under political pressure, witnesses were anonymous and the defence team kept being killed off.

And why no jury? Jury trial is guaranteed, and viewed as essential for justice by the American Bill of Rights (sadly our Bill of Rights doesn't offer the same guarantee. But we still have juries by custom and practice, and presumably think others should too). Poor Iraq, despite being liberated, wasn't deemed civilised enough to have juries. Without them, there's no real presumption of innocence, just a lot of state-appointed officials arguing among themselves about a foregone conclusion. But then George W.Bush had already said that Saddam was guilty, which under English law was such a whopping contempt of court that the trial would have had to be called off. No such rules operate in Baghdad, obviously.

Many of Saddam's known crimes, especially against the Kurds, were not even brought up. The suspicion lingers - and will grow with time - that this is because Saddam would then have had the chance to explain that he had the support of the USA, and other Western countries, in many of his worst actions. Why, the USA's peculiar role in the Kuwait crisis - where the American ambassador in Baghdad said Washington didn't much care about Arab border disputes- might have come up.

But the filmed execution - allegedly to make sure people knew Saddam was dead - will come to be seen as a far graver mistake than the bungled trial. Saddam did not become supreme dictator of Iraq by being a total fool, or by lacking nerve, or by lacking a sense of theatre. He knew his best revenge would be to conduct himself with calm dignity. What's more, he had the guts to do so. Which of us can say for sure that, confronted in cold pre-dawn darkness with the scene of his own approaching death, we would not weep and howl for mercy? Having been present in a real execution shed, I'm not confident.

As for the taunts and jibes of those at the scene, my heart goes out to the nameless voice of the wise, merciful man who repeatedly begged his colleagues to behave with decorum. It's easy to taunt a pinioned and shackled man with a rope round his neck, seconds before he dies. It's not so easy, when your mouth is dry with terror and your bowels are melting from the knowledge that your extinction is almost upon you, to answer back. Who wins this contest?

It is creepy to wonder what sort of restoration will eventually result from this event, or what sort of revenge may result from what still seems to me to be an abuse of power, now tainted with sectarianism. For the shouts of mockery and derision directed against Saddam on the threshold of death were Shia Muslim ones, and the government which swiftly executed him was a Shia one, whereas Saddam was a Sunni. Heaven knows this rift is bad enough already. Now it will be worse. I blush to remember conversations with Baghdadis three years ago, in which I sought - and failed to find - any evidence of Sunni-Shia hostility in that city. In those three years it has been created, and will now perhaps last for centuries.

All men of power do some evil things - some more than others. That is what power involves, and those who want to keep their hands clean should avoid politics altogether. There's an interesting argument about the difference between Saddam's tortures and murders, and the deaths and maimings inflicted on Iraqis and others by the coalition's bombs and missiles. There obviously is a difference, but how big is it, and should the Western leaders be exempt from any kind of accounting for the misery and loss dealt out on their orders? And is the distinction mainly a legal one, a moral one or just a matter of who won? Perhaps more significant in the age of 'extraordinary rendition' the Abu Ghraib abuses and the use of White Phosphorus in Fallujah, is, what would a - for example - Chinese-backed War Crimes Tribunal make of the behaviour of western leaders over the past five years?

Once you have introduced the idea into the world that political leaders, who fall into the hands of their enemies, can be put on trial for the bad things they have done, there's no end to it. I think it vain and silly myself. You'd get rid of far more dictators if you assured them that, by leaving now, they could go into wealthy exile and be forgotten, than by threatening them with trials at the Hague or elsewhere, followed by life in some smoke-free UN jail, or hanging. If every deposed tyrant faces the fate of Saddam or Slobodan, then they will all struggle to stay in power till they die.

If we are already at war with them (and if the war is legal in the first place) It would be much less hypocritical to shoot them out of hand when we find them, and not make too much of a moral fuss about it. This is one of the reasons why the Uday and Qusay killings passed without too much criticism. There was no humbug about justice. It was an act of reasonable revenge under the rough laws of war. Only the 14-year-old complicates matters, so we will forget about that.

I am told that one of the books Kingsley Amis never got round to writing was apparently to have been called 'Judgement at Winchester' . It was to have been a satirical account of a joint Nazi-Soviet tribunal (resulting from a sudden decision by Hitler and Stalin to renew their 1939-41 alliance and turn jointly against Britain), arraigning the Churchill cabinet for war crimes including the bombing of German civilians. You can see why he never wrote it. The satire would have gone much too near the bone. All wars are full of crimes. I've mentioned on this blog before the horrors that resulted from our deliberate bombing of working-class districts of German cities. There is precious little justice in war. And the winner decides what is, and is not, just. So be sure to win.

What's equally interesting is this. Why are politicians such as Mr Blair willing to kill people on principle in foreign wars against distant tyrants who don't threaten us - yet unwilling on principle to kill murderers who really do threaten, and kill, British people at home? And why is bombing all right, when hanging is wrong? Is high explosive more moral than rope? I think the simple answer is probably the right one - that showy triumphs abroad are usually simple and easy. Whereas trying to do anything serious at home is complicated and hard. No wonder he needs a holiday.

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